Lockwood Management is a property management firm located in Michigan, specializing in family and senior housing. Over the last fourteen years Lockwood has grown from managing just six communities to employing 120 team members across 30 sites. Because of their customer-centered “hands on” style of property management, they place a high priority on communication, connectivity and collaboration among their many employees and sites. But their on-site IT systems struggled to keep pace with their growth. Any problems at the main office effectively crippled the entire network.

Upgrading to a Remote Hosting Solution

Dave King, president of Red Level Networks, has helped many businesses work through similar IT growing pains. “As their business grows they’re going to add employees. They usually aren’t thinking about the impact that will have on their server and other equipment. Even just adding a few new users means adding more resources, more licenses, more performance.”

When a business handles their own IT, this translates into having to buy and maintain new equipment. “With remote hosting, like our Mi-CLOUD service, their data infrastructure is managed elastically. We can give them more hardware space with the click of a button, increasing CPU and RAM without an interruption.” Working with Red Level, Lockwood Management stopped handling IT on-site, and shifted to a hosted cloud solution. “Instead of just getting a new server, Lockwood got a brand new enterprise infrastructure running all of their systems, without bringing any new equipment into their office.”

Remote Hosting Increases Uptime

This new system also drastically reduced Lockwood’s downtime. “Five years ago,” Dave King notes, “we might hear from a customer, ‘Oh, my business could be down for 24 or 48 hours, and it really won’t affect us that much.’ But today there’s no tolerance for downtime.”

With remote hosting on Red Level’s Mi-CLOUD service, Lockwood employees are no longer left hanging if their computer dies or the main office has a power outage. “Even if they were in the middle of a session working on their accounting system and that physical machine at their office has an issue, they can just plug another device in, log in, and that same session is still there. They can get right back to work.”

Lockwood Management: “We Were Delighted”

According to Lockwood Management, Red Level Networks “allowed us to reduce our dependency on on-site equipment. In the past, if the main office was down, it meant that all sites were unable to work. Now, with Red Level’s highly available datacenter, our users can connect as long as they have an internet connection. We were delighted that in a very short time they managed to . . . make our physical move [to new offices] feel like a non-event.”

Next Steps

• Learn more about Mi-CLOUD.
• Read about our managed services.
• Contact us to ask about a free consultation.